New touchscreen and web game in one

I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash. Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language. And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor. This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate. The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too. Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files. The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.